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" If it&amp;#039;s almost May, then it must be time for those of us in the Commonwealth (God save it!) to vote for senator again. We have two primaries today, one in each party, and both of them completely defenestrated from the news cycle by the events surrounding the Boston Marathon a couple of weeks ago. On the Democratic side, it looks very much like Congressman Ed Markey will hold on and defeat his colleague, Steve Lynch. But the more interesting race might be on the Republican side, where they have managed to cobble together a three-way field that at the very least looks as though it will contest fiercely the 27 votes needed to win a GOP primary in Massachusetts in an off-year election. Michael Sullivan is a former US Attorney and the current acting director of the Bureau Of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives, whose CV -- and campaign -- got a perverse boost from what happened at the Marathon. His opponent is Gabriel Gomez, a former SEAL and a businessman who, according to Tiger Beat On The Potomac, is campaigning for political office on the grounds that he is largely apolitical. &amp;quot;I&amp;#039;m running against two fine men ... but combined, they&amp;#039;ve got 40 years of political experience. On the Democratic side, there are two guys with 60 years of combined political experience...I&amp;#039;ll wear it with a badge of honor that I have zero political experience.&amp;quot; He also has taken a position on Dzhokar Tsarnaev&amp;#039;s legal status on the grounds that he, Gomez, is not a lawyer. &amp;quot;I didn&amp;#039;t need to be a lawyer or a career politician to come to the conclusion right away that we need to hold this person as an enemy combatant,&amp;quot; said Gomez. If you don&amp;#039;t understand how inexpertise can become a political boon, especially on the Republican side, you haven&amp;#039;t been paying attention for three decades. Of course, Gomez isn&amp;#039;t quite the political naif that he&amp;#039;s selling to the Commonwealth. He was the spokesman for the group of SEALS who accused the president of using the raid in which Osama bin Laden was killed for crass political purposes. He even made an ad to that effect, and the organization that sponsored it is raising money for his current campaign. He also wrote a letter to Governor Deval Patrick in which he auditioned to be appointed to the seat in question when John Kerry left to become Secretary Of State. This is called playing both ends against the middle. Guess what, Gabriel? You&amp;#039;re a politician. Ask around. (In addition, Gomez has enlisted the aid of Eric (O-for-2012) Fehrnstrom, and he cites Senator Ron (Last Shred Of Freedom) Johnson of Wisconsin, whom we last saw being fed into the woodchipper by Hillary Clinton, as a political role model. Oy.) Gomez would be the far more interesting candidate, but Sullivan has the edge in organization, and on gravitas, such as it is in Massachusetts Republican politics. In any event, we&amp;#039;re electing a senator again. We&amp;#039;re starting to get pretty good at it. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.esquire.com/news-politics/politics/a18325/the-massachusetts-senate-race/>